The resulting dialectic between this new reason and faith, between human knowledge of the natural world and the inherited doctrines of divine revelation, emerged fully in the thirteenth century’s culminating Scholastic philosophers Albertus Magnus and his pupil Thomas Aquinas. Both men were devoutly loyal to biblical theology, yet also concerned with the mysteries of the physical world, and sympathetic to Aristotle’s affirmation of nature, the body, and the human intellect. These scholars of Scholasticism’s golden age could not have known the ultimate consequences of their intellectual quest to comprehend all that exists. For by confronting so directly this tension between divergent tendencies—Greek and Christian, reason and faith, nature and spirit—the Scholastics prepared the way in the late medieval universities for the massive convulsion in the Western world view caused by the Scientific Revolution.
Albertus was the first medieval thinker to make the firm distinction between knowledge derived from theology and knowledge derived from science. The theologian is the expert in matters of faith, but in mundane matters the scientist knows more. Albertus asserted the independent value of secular learning and the need for sense perceptions and empirical observations on which to ground one’s knowledge of the natural world. In this view, Aristotle’s philosophy was regarded as the greatest achievement of the natural human reason working without benefit of Christian inspiration.
After Albertus had grasped the intellectual power of Aristotelianism and established it as a necessary part of the university curriculum, Aquinas was left the philosophical task of coherently integrating the Greek challenge. Devout Dominican, son of Italian nobility, descendant of the Norman and Lombard conquerors, student at Naples, Paris, and Cologne, advisor to Rome—Aquinas knew the breadth and dynamism of European cultural life and did his pivotal teaching at the University of Paris, at the epicenter of the West’s intellectual ferment. In Aquinas, the forces at work in the immediately previous centuries came to full articulation. In his relatively brief life he would forge a world view that dramatically epitomized the high Middle Ages’ turning of Western thought on its axis, to a new direction of which the modern mind would be the heir and trustee.
The Quest of Thomas Aquinas
The passion for synthesis that Albertus and Aquinas experienced was perhaps inevitable for such men at that moment in history, standing between the past and the future: drawn magnetically toward the opening of the natural world and a new range of intellectual competence, yet imbued with an unshakable, indeed renewed faith in Christian revelation. Moreover, it was the peculiarity of that era, and of those men in particular, that these two loyalties—to the gospel on the one hand, and to the natural world and human reason on the other—were felt not as antithetical but as mutually supportive. Albertus and Aquinas were both members of the Dominican order and thus participants in a sustained and widespread influx of evangelical fervor spearheaded a generation earlier by Dominic and Francis of Assisi. The quickly flourishing Dominican and Franciscan mendicant orders had brought not only new vitality but new values to medieval Christianity.
Francis’s mystical joy in the sacred fellowship of nature, Dominic’s cultivation of scholarship in the service of the gospel, their dissolution of rigid boundaries between clerical and lay, their more democratic forms of internal government granting greater individual autonomy, their call to leave the monastic cloister to preach and teach actively in the world—all these encouraged a new openness to nature and society, to human reason and freedom. Above all, this fresh infusion of apostolic faith supported a direct dialogue between Christian revelation and the secular world, while recognizing anew an intimate relation between nature and grace. In the eyes of the evangelicals, the Word of God was not a remote truth to be cloistered far from humanity’s daily life, but was directly relevant to the immediate particularities of human experience. By its very nature, the gospel required entrance into the world.3
Heirs to this religious rapprochement with the secular, Albertus and Aquinas could more freely develop those aspects of the Christian theological tradition, found even in Augustine, that affirmed the Creator’s providential intelligence and the resulting order and beauty within the created world. It was a short step to their conclusion that the more the world was explored and understood, the greater knowledge of and reverence for God would result. Since there could be only one valid truth derived from the one God, nothing reason would uncover could ultimately contradict theological doctrine. Nothing that was true and valuable, even if achieved by man’s natural intellect, could ultimately be foreign to God’s revelation, for both reason and faith derived from the same source. But Aquinas went still further, asserting that nature itself could provide a deeper appreciation of divine wisdom, and that a rational exploration of the physical world could disclose its inherent religious value—not just as a dim reflection of the supernatural but on its own terms, a rationally intelligible natural order discovered in its profane reality.
Traditional theologians opposed the new scientific perspective because its purported discovery of regular determining laws of nature seemed to diminish God’s free creativity, while also threatening man’s personal responsibility and need for faith in Providence. To assert the value of nature seemed to usurp the supremacy of God. Basing their arguments on the teachings of Augustine concerning nature’s fall and the need for God’s redemptive grace, they viewed the new science’s positive and deterministic conception of nature as a heretical threat to the essence of Christian doctrine.
But Aquinas held that the recognition of nature’s order enhanced human understanding of God’s creativity and in no way lessened divine omnipotence, which he saw as expressing itself in a continuous creation according to ordered patterns over which God remained sovereign. Within this structure, God willed each creature to move according to its own nature, with man himself given the greatest degree of autonomy by virtue of his rational intelligence. Man’s freedom was not threatened either by natural laws or by his relationship to God, but rather was built into the fabric of the divinely created order. And the fact of nature’s orderliness allowed man to develop a rational science that would lead his mind to God.
For Aquinas, the natural world was not just an opaque material stage upon which man briefly resided as a foreigner to work out his spiritual destiny. Nor was nature governed by principles alien to spiritual concerns. Rather, nature and spirit were intimately bound up with each other, and the history of one touched the history of the other. Man himself was the pivotal center of the two realms, “like a horizon of the corporeal and of the spiritual.” To give value to nature did not, in Aquinas’s eyes, usurp God’s supremacy. Rather, nature was valuable, as was man, precisely because God gave it existence. To be a creature of the Creator did not signify a separation from God, but rather a relationship to God. Moreover, divine grace did not vitiate nature, but perfected it.
Aquinas was also convinced that human reason and freedom were valuable on their own account, and that their actualization would further serve the glory of the Creator. Man’s autonomy of will and intellect was not limited by the fact of God’s omnipotence, nor would their full emergence be an inappropriate presumption of powers by a creature against the Creator. Rather, these special qualities were themselves founded in God’s own nature, for man was made in God’s image. Man could, by his unique relationship with the Creator, enjoy autonomous intellectual and volitional powers modeled on those of God himself.
Influenced by Aristotle’s teleological concept of nature’s relation to the highest Form and the Neoplatonic understanding of the all-pervasive One, Aquinas declared a new basis for the dignity and potential of man: Within human nature, as divinely posited, lay the potential for actively moving toward perfect communion with the infinite ground of man’s being, God, who was the source of all development toward perfection in nature. Even human language incarnated the divine wisdom, and was therefore a worthy instrument capable of approaching and elaborating the mysteries of creation. Hence hu
man reason could function within faith and yet according to its own principles. Philosophy could stand on its own virtues apart from, and yet complementary to, theology. Human intelligence and freedom received their reality and value from God himself, for God’s infinite generosity allowed his creatures to participate in his own being each according to its distinctive essence, and man could do so to the full extent of his ever-developing humanness.
At the heart of Aquinas’s vision was his belief that to subtract these extraordinary capacities from man would be to presume to lessen the infinite capacity of God himself and his creative omnipotence. To strive for human freedom and for the realization of specifically human values was to promote the divine will. God had created the world as a realm with immanent ends, and to reach his ultimate ends, man was intended to pass through immanent ends: to be as God intended, man had fully to realize his humanity. Man was an autonomous part of God’s universe, and his very autonomy allowed him to make his return freely to the source of all. Indeed, only if man were genuinely free could he be capable of freely loving God, of freely realizing his exalted spiritual destiny.
Aquinas’s appreciation of human nature extended to the human body, an appreciation that affected his distinctive epistemological orientation. In contrast to Plato’s antiphysical stance, reflected in much of the tenor of traditional Augustinian theology, Aquinas incorporated Aristotelian concepts to assert a new attitude. In man, spirit and nature were distinguishable, but they were also aspects of a homogeneous whole: The soul was the form of man, the body was the matter. Man’s body was thus intrinsically necessary to his existence.4 In epistemological terms, it was to man’s benefit that his soul was united with a body, for it was only man’s physical observations that could activate his potential understanding of things. Aquinas repeatedly quoted from Paul’s Letter to the Romans, “the invisible things of God are clearly seen … by the things that are made.” The divine invisibles, among which Aquinas included the “eternal types” of Augustine and Plato, could be approached only through the empirical, the observation of the visible and particular. By experiencing the particular through the senses, the human mind could then move toward the universal, which made intelligible the particular. Therefore both sense experience and intellect were necessary for cognition, each informing the other. In contrast to Plato’s implication, sense and intellect for Aquinas were not opponents in the quest for knowledge, but partners. Like Aristotle, Aquinas believed that the human intellect could not have direct access to transcendent Ideas, but that it required sensory experience to awaken its potential knowledge of universals.
Just as Aquinas’s epistemology more deeply stressed the value and even necessity of this-world experience for human knowledge, so did his ontology assert the essential worth and substantiality of this world’s existence.5 Sensible things did not exist merely as relatively unreal images, as shadowy replications of the Platonic Ideas; rather, they had a substantial reality of their own, as Aristotle had maintained. The forms were genuinely embedded in matter, united with matter to produce a composite whole. But here Aquinas went beyond the Aristotelians’ tendency to view nature as existing apart from God, arguing that a deeper philosophical understanding of the meaning of existence would fully connect the created world with God. To accomplish this, Aquinas reintroduced the Platonic notion of “participation” in this new context: Created things have true substantial reality because they participate in Existence, which is from God, the infinite self-subsistent ground of all being. For God’s essence was precisely his existence, his infinite act of being which underlay the finite existence of all created things, each with its own particular essence.
The essence of each thing, its specific kind of being, is the measure of its participation in the real existence communicated to it by God. What a thing is and the fact that it is at all are two distinct aspects of any created being. In God alone is there absolute simplicity, for what God is and the fact of his being are one and the same: God is “be-ing” itself—unlimited, absolute, beyond definition. Thus every creature is a compound of essence and existence, while God alone is not a compound, for his essence is existence per se. Creatures have existence; God is existence. Existence for creatures is not self-given, and therein lay Aquinas’s fundamental philosophical tenet: the absolute contingency of the finite world on an infinite giver of being.
Thus for Aquinas, God was not only the supreme Form drawing nature forth, but was also the very ground of nature’s existence. For both Aristotle and Aquinas, form was an active principle—not just a structure, but a dynamism toward realization; and the entire creation was dynamically moved relative to the highest Form, God. But whereas Aristotle’s God was apart from and indifferent to the creation of which he was the unmoved mover, for Aquinas God’s true essence was existence. God communicated his essence to his creation, each instance of which became real to the extent of its reception of the act of existence communicated by God. Only in this way was the Aristotelian Prime Mover genuinely connected to the creation he motivated. And conversely, only thus was the Platonic transcendent genuinely connected to the empirical world of multiplicity and flux.
Building on philosophical developments in the Arab and Christian Neoplatonist traditions (which were, besides Augustine and Boethius, the main sources for his knowledge of Plato), and particularly on the thought of the ancient Eastern Christian mystic who used the name Dionysius the Areopagite, Aquinas aspired to deepen Aristotle by using Platonic principles. Yet he also saw Platonism’s need for Aristotelian principles. Indeed, for Aquinas, the Platonic theory of participation made full metaphysical sense only when it was deepened to reach the principle of existence itself, beyond the various types of being that existence might lend itself to. And this deepening required an Aristotelian context of a nature that possessed real being—a reality achieved through nature’s constant process of becoming, its dynamic movement from potentiality to actuality. Thus Aquinas showed the complementarity of the two Greek philosophers, of Plato’s exalted spiritual absolute and Aristotle’s dynamically real nature, an integration achieved by using Plato’s participation relative not to the Ideas but to Existence. In doing so, he further corrected Aristotle by showing that concrete individuals were not just isolated substances, but were united both to each other and to God by their common participation in existence. Yet he also corrected Plato by arguing that divine Providence did not pertain just to the Ideas, but extended directly to individuals, each of which was created in the image of God and participated, each in its limited fashion, in God’s unlimited act of existence.
Aquinas thus gave to God alone what Plato gave to Ideas in general, but by doing so gave increased reality to the empirical creation. Since “to be” is to participate in existence, and since existence is itself the gift of God’s own being, then every created thing possesses a true reality founded in God’s infinite reality. The Ideas are in a sense the exemplars of God’s creation, as formal designs in God’s mind; but on the deepest level God is the true and ultimate exemplar of creation, and all the Ideas are inflections of that supreme essence. All created beings participate firstly and most significantly in God’s nature, each in its own specific finite manner manifesting a part of God’s infinite variety and perfection. In Aquinas’s understanding, God was not so much a thing, an entity that was the first of a series of other entities, but was rather the infinite act of existence (esse) from which everything derived its own being. In effect, Aquinas synthesized Plato’s transcendent reality with Aristotle’s concrete reality by means of the Christian understanding of God as the loving infinite Creator, giving freely of his own being to his creation. Similarly, he synthesized the Aristotelian stress on nature’s and man’s teleological dynamism, striving forward to more perfect realization, with the Platonic emphasis on nature’s participation in a superior transcendent reality, by conceiving the divine as standing in absolute ineffable perfection and yet also as bestowing its essence—i.e., existence—to created things. The
se are then moved dynamically toward realization precisely because they participate in being, which is by its nature a dynamic tendency toward the Absolute. As in Neoplatonism, all creation begins and ends with, goes forth from and returns to, the supreme One. But for Aquinas, God created and gave being to the world not by necessary emanation but by a free act of personal love. And the creature participated not merely in the One as a distant semi-real emanation, but in “be-ing” (esse) as a fully real individual entity created by God.
So Aquinas followed Aristotle in his regard for nature, for its reality and dynamism, for individual beings, and for the epistemological necessity of sense experience. Yet in his emphatic awareness of a superior transcendent reality, his belief in the immortality of the individual soul, and his strongly spiritual sensibility which focused on a loving God as the infinite source and goal of being, he continued the Augustinian tradition of medieval theology and thereby more nearly resembled Plato and Plotinus. But the distinction Aquinas made against Plato and Augustine in relation to the Ideas and human knowledge was an epistemologically significant one, for it sanctioned the Christian intellect’s explicit recognition of the essential value of sensory experience and empiricism, which Plato and Augustine had devalued in favor of direct illumination from the transcendent Ideas. Aquinas did not deny the existence of the Ideas. Rather, ontologically he denied their self-subsistence apart from material reality (in keeping with Aristotle) and their separate creative status apart from God (in keeping with Christian monotheism and Augustine’s placement of the Ideas within the creative mind of God). And epistemologically he denied the human intellect’s capacity to know the Ideas directly, asserting the intellect’s need for sensory experience to activate an imperfect but meaningful understanding of things in terms of those eternal archetypes. If man would know even imperfectly what God knows perfectly, he would have to open his eyes to the physical world.
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